06 March 2008
County Durham and Darlington patients benefit from SystmOne Out of Hours
County Durham and Darlington PCTs are in the process of moving four unscheduled care units to SystmOne. Karen Roberts, Unscheduled Care Manager, is involved in the projects. She reflects on the decision to move to SystmOne: "We chose to move the units to SystmOne because of the benefits around access to patient records. There's a huge safety benefit to patients with clinicians having access to their medical records. Clinicians can access things like drug history, so if the patient is allergic to something but they're not sure exactly what, or if they don't remember the name of the medication they're on, the clinician can view the record and find out. They can see up-to-date information that aids the clinical decision making process, they can see lab reports, blood results and investigations. That all helps with continuity of care."
Karen has this advice for other Out of Hours or Unscheduled Care units considering moving to SystmOne, "Getting process mapping right at the beginning of the project is important, particularly so that trainers understand the processes they need to work through. But before you decide, come and visit one of the centres to see SystmOne working for yourselves. Then you can see it in practice and assess whether it's the right system for you."
Out of Hours services using SystmOne in County Durham and Darlington PCT serve 21 GP practices, eight of which currently use SystmOne GP, and with another centre due to Go Live in spring 2008, integrated patient records are benefiting more and more patients.
Karen says, "We can access patient records for around 40% of patients at the moment. And as more GP practices go live on SystmOne, the OOH service will benefit. When we encounter a patient without a SystmOne record, we will create one for them, then when the consultation is over, we print out an Out of Hours view from SystmOne and fax that to the GP. I hope that eventually the majority of patient records will be available in OOH, whether that's through SystmOne or through the national Spine."
SystmOne Out of Hours is part of the core offering provided by CSC Computer Sciences under the National Programme for IT, and is therefore available with funding from the Connecting for Health project in the North, East and Midlands regions of England.
Click here to read our new SystmOne Out of Hours Case Study.
